Quakers and The Lamb's War: A Hermeneutic for Confronting Evil
Conclusion

For Friends, practice takes precedence over doctrine. The Quaker peace
testimony depends less on a verbally articulated theology as on an implicit
realized eschatology (e.g. as in Luke 17:21, "The kingdom of God is among
you.") in which the Sermon on the Mount is taken seriously here and now and
not for some future time. Our ecclesiology is more explicit, finding church in
the community of believers and, more important, doers. Central to our peace
testimony is an optimistic anthropology in which we can know and witness to
the divine spirit, and thereby nurture its seed in others, and "come to walk
cheerfully over the world, answering that of God in everyone."

Three aspects of our peace testimony, which when taken together give a
distinctive flavor to our peace witness, are its assertiveness ("Speak Truth
to Power"), its positive assumptions (the call "to answer that of God in
everyone") and its basis in community. Walter Wink provides us with a modern
Quaker hermeneutic for understanding it, as based in Jesus' Third Way. The
Alternative to Violence Project provides us with a model of how this can work
in at least one area in which violence is a problem.

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